B007P4V3G4 EBOK (20 page)

But his own work hampers the Mighty One and forbids Him to
be what He wishes, and to attain that which He strives for, for as
long as Time already is; it forces the Free to grow into an
impediment to themselves and they ensnare themselves in
Paradise-closing vines.

Thus He grew into a forest of Hate and Anger and Pride and
Love and Sorrow, which was I, and the wrestling trunks destroyed
one another in a powerless crowding-in.

And Pride spake:

I wish to remain what I am; Time shall come storming with
hurtling Years, but he shall not tame me; and his tireless showers,
those gnawing hour-drops, shall not soak me loose.

And Anger and Hate and Sorrow fumed and wailed in unvanquished rage. Love alone stood timid and still, fearful of the
perceptivity of her stronger sisters.

And darkness hung over the battle, blackened by the moon-pale
magic glow of the Love-blossoms.

And a butterfly, a Sacred Butterfly, thy Soul, came fluttering by
and the darkness did not strike fear into her, nor did the muttering
threat of destruction.

She, God had sent, Who sped to His Own aid. And she perched
on a Love-blossom and the wings trembled in strange light.

And a rustling such as had never been heard before, hummed through the battling chaos - thus the evening star shines among
the shards of cloud when November storms - And the tree upon
which the Butterfly sat, began to grow and branches sprouted on
all sides, and the blossom, curious, was coaxed out carefully.

And the Butterfly sat quietly; only its wings trembled in golden
light.

And the tree shone with white-gleaming flowers, the Christmas
Tree of my soul. For the Messiah had come, the Anointed One,
the Christ, who makes blessed. The one who was lost, She sought
out; She raised him who wept over the unwilling-willing fall. She
was the pure child of God; She was the Law and the Prophets.

But She had not come to bring the sword; She brought peace,
for Hate and Anger and Pride could not grow in the white light,
and they said:

Who is it who hampers us in our most mighty growth? This is
our domain; here our enmity reigns in unity. We tolerate no
usurper.

And they resisted and with tough root-joints they clamped
themselves fast to their territory and sought to suck power from
the soil that had been willing until now. But that which was meant
to serve their victory flowed to the young tree. And the calyxes
began to ring out: an Alleluia for the Christ, a dead march for the
vanquished.

And they cringed and withered, the tremendous ones; they
recognised their weakness and their injustice, and their death
honoured She Who Rules Alone. And there She stood, my sacred
flower, singing light, white-glowing music.

Thou hast saved me. Thy weakness is the strong shepherd who
snatches the lost lamb from the jaws of the wolf and returns it to
the warm stable.

What dost thou wish to do with my life? The sky was dark and
I was standing on a lonely heath; the spruces did not move and
there was not a sound; the flowers were gone; November had
washed them away and all was grey and drab-brown; and slowly
the clouds slid forth across distant-sorrowing forests. And dusk
came, and the silence became even quieter when the gloomy
colour-music ceased. And the clouds travelled on, ever more new
clouds, endless; and the woods vanished; the black absorbed
everything into itself. Once upon a time they had been cheerful;
the sun's rays had played tag among the tree trunks when July had
been their guest, and high up among the crowns had hung a lively net of cheerful insects, marquetry in the blue sky, a living mosaic,
buzzing specks of light. And now, all was gone. They no longer
wished to live, the cheerless forests, and they dissolved themselves
in the heavy void. And I alone still lived. Everything died away
around me; Nothingness enticed to flee the sorrow in its endless
quiet. For, there again stood she, never ageing Sorrow, the only
damsel who stands outside of time's power. I saw her emerge from
the mists and she came and stood and stared at me. And I pleaded
with her and said: what have I done unto you that you persecute
me? Have I not served you above all others, for many years? I was
your friend when you were modest but my obedience rebelled
against your stringent demands. Why do you desire that I do
homage only to you? You are not God's sole daughter and Your
greater dominion does not entitle you to exclusive claim on my
loyalty. Black is your cloak and black your I am young.

How can you wish that I devote my soul to dull-mute mourning?
Your tread sounds like a dead march and I want wedding music.
Let me go Sorrow regarded me and said with a voice
that sounded like high winds rushing in indifferent progress over
the earth:

You are not free; my Eternal Father gave you to me in perpetual
ownership. When he woke me from sleep and sent me abroad into
the World, I asked him: how shall I rule, as everyone is hostile to
me? Though my power is great, how shall I not be inferior to the
hate of all and to gnawing fatigue? And then he spake: People will
hate you and struggle against your kingship, but I shall prepare
you a resting place in the souls of those who help others in their
struggle. He who wages war on you for others, he shall be your
property - And therefore I follow you, for you belong to me -
Why should you honour my sisters? Beauty is not intended for
you; she laughs and you have been in my company too long to
join in with her laughter. And Reason? She is too rigid and too
cold and cannot satisfy your feeling. Your heart is my home. And I
wanted to flee; kindly, Death signalled me with serious-smiling
face; he seemed to await me and he looked at me encouragingly.
Oh, I longed for peace. I stared back down my life and sought for
sun spots, and the road was a long and monotonous one.

Thou know'st not how much I love thee: how could a girl feel the
glow of a man? What do you wish that I shall do for you? Shall I
pile Switzerland upon the Rocky Mountains and make the ocean flop down from the barely visible peak, a world-rending waterfall
so that you say: isn't that charming? Or do you like fireworks?
Shall I tie comets to Vesuvius, bright flags for our high day, and
the Milky Way, vane of light-gauze? Shall I make green and red
and gold suns whirl about in mystic figures, a multi-coloured
shower of sparks, as a small tribute to you? Would you like
wedding music? Then the storm shall howl an Appassionata and
the thunder will roll the drums. Do you want bridal raiments such
as no empress has ever worn, raiments befitting you, radiant
empress of my radiant soul? Out of the scarlet sun-down I will
weave you a cloak and I will hang the Southern Cross upon your
breast. But what shall I set around your hair, your dark-smooth
hair? Shall I weave the rays of the sun into a bridal
that is too dull. I will lay my mouth upon your head and I will
whisper how much I love you: and flames in whose presence
thunderbolts would cast a shadow shall crown you.

What shall be our bridal couch? Come! The cloud-shore is hilly,
full of bright valleys there where the sea of moonlight dreams. No,
those are not stars; those are golden waterlilies; no, those are not
meteors: it is the radiance of the sea -

Behold how I have furnished our bridal apartment, worthy of
our love.

The walls I have covered in blue light and pondering sea-roses,
and cushions await in twilight, and the sea hums Fingal-melodies
and the South Wind - there, in that grotto - plays the harp.

Oh, I love thee, thy hair and thy shoulders and thy breast; I
wish to kiss thee unto intoxication and sink away in God. I feel
how thou dost tremble with desire; thine eye glitters my festive
light to gleamlessness. What flames are those that thou see'st?
Those are the flames of thy love which shall shout with joy around
thee in sacred glow - And those noises humming in thine ears?

It is the organ-playing in thy soul, it is the hymn singing of thy
love. Come - I wish to drink thy soul from thy lips and breathe
unconscious sanctity into thee; the fire-flower of bliss shall bloom
in us, the wonder-flower which grows in the caressing glow of
thine eyes, in the scorching coolness of thy mouth. Thy dark plait
shall I wind around my throat, for I wish to be the happy prisoner
of thy Beauty; I lay my right arm around thy soft shoulders, my
left hand around thy tender breast.

Lodewijk van Deyssel

When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the great French
monarchy sank, strange things, it is said, happened on the plain.
Society turned topsy-turvy and one saw noisy, seditious riff-raff
babbling and singing in hordes, screeching, gesturing and dancing
stumbling dances in those gracious areas of the city where until
then only the well-styled, finely-coloured promenaders had moved,
and where the carriages, driven by coachmen who themselves
were aristocrats, ran their elegant course.

In the streets of Paris meanwhile, among all kinds of pedestrians,
one had also seen many unfortunates and drab figures: hunchbacks,
paralytics, squints and twisted-ones, purple noses, longlobes,
dwarves, flatfooters, idiots with green-hued faces and folk with
large sweatmarks on their backsides, creatures in drab-grey rags
from whose nose and red-rimmed, cunning eyes ran sickly gin, and
especially no mean number of ordinary, dull at the
time when it was so bad the monarchy was being mocked in its
own dwelling, one saw something extraordinary occur: on the
squares which one overlooked from the windows of the Palace,
monsters in human shape appeared in the open spaces, right out in
the sun, unfortunates and ass-heads whose defects were so garish
that, until then, they had never shown themselves outside of the
alleys, slums and subterranean pits where only nightfall would see
them, together with the mice and the spiders, creep timorously
along the walls. So extraordinary were the humps, of such huge
dimensions the flat feet, so far advanced the tumours at the back of
the head, so wild the twists of the noses combined with the
appearance of the eyes, that these catastrophically afflicted ones
could not appear without at once attracting the most violent and
nigh magnetic interest of all physicians, nurses, students of surgery,
proprietors of circus booths, zoo-attendants, while at the same
time drawing such unstoppable snorting and careering belly laughs,
not just from street urchins, the pale and bored shop assistants in
their doorways, the hearty travelling salesmen returning from a free lunch and even from posh professors and bankers, but no less
from staff of the Salvation Army - anachronistically, astrally and
prophetically present preachers, from zealots, from
melancholy-minded ones, from the deeply griefstricken whose
loved ones had just passed away, from the sick, from ones in a
state of dead-faint, and from all the folk who, for humanitarian
reasons, never laughed otherwise, be this out of principle or by
nature.

Now, confusion in society was so great, to such an extent did
the whole world appear to be standing on its head, that everyone
made common cause with these apparitions in the end. An illustrious marquess, noble of face and fine in mien, became familiar with
a half-rotten dwarf-monster from a very remotely situated fire-andwater business: an enormously large, Jewish Easterbread-coloured,
moth-eaten and bald head on a, because of a grave case of
waterbelly and backswelling, egg-shaped short body, green, with
innumerable glass bead-encrusted slippers below - and to this the
marquess offered a pinch of snuff. A slim duchess in lace and satin,
the truffle of a beauty-spot like an aroma of loveliness in the pale
white of the face, spoke chummily to a woman-figure surrounded
by an invisible cloud of acrid emanations who for thirty years had
spent her only sober half hour each day lying about, sucking out
the fishheads on the scrapheaps of public eating-houses, and who
now stood listening and nodding with a downwardly sagging,
purply-red nose from the pores of which greenish worms wriggled
up, and from the nostrils of which, besides manifold warts and pink
secondary ulcers, greasy spikes of hair pricked down on to the binshaped bottom lip - down which eyes like rancid hatpin tips
with her mouth which, as regards teeth, sported
but a lone fragment of black enamel.

And in the end, the most eminent citizen in the land was
surrounded too: he, who himself previously had chased the riff-raff
from his marble floors with his own hands, with the knout and the
whip for those beggars and thieves whom one does not tackle
with sword or on his great king's head, on those hairs
soft as silk, was placed an old fool's cap which housed two
colonies of lice.